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A cofounder of the social, news and entertainment website reddit has been found dead.

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He certainly was a prodigy, although he never kind of thought of himself like that.

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He was totally unexcited

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about starting businesses and making money.

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There's a profound sense of lost in Highland Park,

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Aaron Swartz's hometown,

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as loved ones say good-bye to one of the Internet's brightest lights.

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Freedom, open access and computer activists are mourning his loss.

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"An astonishing intellect", if you talk to people who knew him.

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He was killed by the government

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and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.

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They wanted to make an example out of him.

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Governments have insatiable desire to control.

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He was potentially facing 35 years in prison and a one million dollar fine.[br]

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Raising questions of prosecutorial zeal, and I would say even misconduct.

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Have you looked into that particular matter and reached any conclusions?

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Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing

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that all the things around me, that people had told me

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were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be

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They weren't natural at all, there were things that could be changed

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and there were things that more importantly were wrong and should change.

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And once I realized that, there was really kind of no going back.

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The Internet's Own Boy.

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Welcome to story reading time.

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The name of the book is "Paddington at the fair".

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Well, he was born in Highland Park and grew up here.

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Aaron came from a family of three brothers, all extraordinarily bright.

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Oh, the box is tipping over...

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So we were all, you know, not the best behaved children.

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You know, three boys running around all the time, causing trouble.

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Hey, no, no no!

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- Aaron![br]- What?

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But I've come to the realization that Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age.

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One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight...

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- Knock, knock![br]- Who's there?

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- Aaron.[br]- Aaron who?

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- Aaron Funnyman.

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He knew what he wanted, and he always wanted to do it.

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He always accomplished what he wanted.

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His curiosity was endless.

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Here's a little picture of what the planets are.

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And each planet has a symbol. Mercury symbol, Venus symbol, Earth symbol, Mars symbol...

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One day he said to Susan: what's this free family entertainment downtown Highland Park?

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He was three at the time.

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She said: what are you talking about?

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He said: Look, it says here on the refrigerator, "Free family entertainment downtown Highland Park".

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She was floored and astonished that he could read.

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It's called "My Family Seder".

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That Seder night is different from all other nights.

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I remember once, we were at the University of Chicago Library.

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I pulled a book off the shelf that was from like 1900.

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And showed to him, and said: you know, this is an extraordinary place.

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We all were curious children, but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching.

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And what we're going to learn is ABC backwards.

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Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T...

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I remember he came home from his first Algebra class.

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He was like: Noah, let me teach you Algebra!

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and I'm like: what is Algebra?

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And he was always like that.

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Now let's press click button, there! Now it's got that!

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Now it's in pink!

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When he was about two or three years old, and Bob introduced him to computers,

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then he just took off, like crazy on them.

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(baby talk)

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We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them, really took to the Internet.

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- Working at the computer?[br]- Naah..

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- How c... mommy, why is nothing working?

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He started programming from a really young age.

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I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in Basic, and it was a Star Wars trivia game.

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He sat down with me in the basement, where the computer was,

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for hours, programming this game.

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The problem that I kept having with him is that there was nothing that I wanted done.

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And to him, there was always something to do, always something that programming could solve.

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The way Aaron always saw it, is that programming is magic.

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You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't.

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Aaron made an ATM, using, like, a MacIntosh and, like, a cardboard box.

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One year for Halloween, I didn't know what I wanted to be,

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and he thought it would be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer,

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which at the time was the original iMac.

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I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween but he loved convincing other people

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to dress up in these things that he wanted to see.

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Host Aaron, stop! Guys, come on, look at the camera!

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He made this website called The Info, where people could just fill in information.

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I'm sure someone out there knows everything about gold, gold leafing.

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Why they don't write about that on this website? And then other people can come at a later point

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and read that information, and edit the information if they thought it was bad.

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Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?

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And this was before Wikipedia begun, and this is developed by a 12 year old,

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in his room, by himself, running on this tiny server, using ancient technology.

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One of the teachers response was, like: This is a terrible idea, you cant' just let anyone author the encyclopedia.

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The whole reason we have scholars is to write these books for us. How did you have such a terrible idea?

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Me and my other brother will go, like: Oh, you know, Wikipedia is cool, but we had that in our house, like, five years ago.

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Aaron's website, theinfo.org, wins a school competition

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hosted by the Cambridge-based web design firm ArsDigita.

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We all went to Cambridge when he won the ArsDigita prize

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and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.

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It was obvious that the prize was really important.

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Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities,

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then in the process of shaping a new tool for the web.

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He comes up saying to me, like: Ben, there's this really awesome thing that I'm working on.

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You need to hear about it!

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And I'm like: yeah, what is it?

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And he says: It's a thing called RSS.

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And he explains me what RSS is.

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And I'm like: why is that useful, Aaron? Is any site using it, like why would I want to use it?

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There is this mailing list for people who are working on RSS, and XML more generally.

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And there's a person on it named Aaron Swartz, who is combative but very smart and who had lots of good ideas

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and he'd never come to face-to-face meetings, and they said,

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you know, when are you gonna come to any of these face-to-face meetings?

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And he said: you know, I don't think my mom would let me. I'm.. I've just turned 14.

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So their first reaction was, well, you know, this person, this colleague we'we been working with all year is...

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was 13 years old while we were working with him, and he's only 14 now.

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And their second reaction was: Christ, we really want to meet him! That's extraordinary!

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He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

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What he was doing was to help build the plumming for modern hypertext.

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The piece that he was working on, RSS, was a tool that you can use to get summaries

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of things that are going on on other web pages.

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Most commonly, you would use this for a blog. You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.

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You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of what's going on on those other pages

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to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.

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Aaron was really young, but he understood the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

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and looked for ways to help make it better.

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So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago, we'd pick him up in San Francicso.

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We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvle at his horriffic eating habits.

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He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

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and white bread, and so on...

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And you kind of marvled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

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what appeared to be a small boy's mouth.

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And you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

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Aaron, you're up!

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I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms.

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You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

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But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

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Think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand!

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He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

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sort of like: "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you I'm better than you,

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and I can tell you what to do".

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It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

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So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems

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like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

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I first met him on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.

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He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got.

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He was a connector.

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The free culture movement, he had a lot of this energy.

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I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it.

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He had a very kind of strong personality, that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

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It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

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and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

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Aaron got into high school and he was really just sick of school.

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He didn't like it, he didn't like any of the classes that were being thaught, he didn't like the teachers.

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Aaron really knew how to get information.

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He was like: "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry.

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I can just read the geometry book.

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And I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history,

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like I have like three historical compilations here, I could just read them.

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And I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the web".

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I was very frustrated with school, I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about.

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They were domineering and controlling, the homework was kind of a sham

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and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busy work.

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And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education

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and how this educational system was developed.

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Then, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

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as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them.

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And that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

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I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

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I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

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One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days.

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Copyright has always been something kind of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,

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but it wasn't an eccessive burden, it was a reasonable institution to have in place,

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to make sure that people got paid.

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What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system

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and this amazing new thing we were trying to build, the Internet and the Web.

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These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

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He then met Harvard's Law professor Lawrence Lessig,

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who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

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The young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

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I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the LD, to see the LD document.

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Why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the LD argument?

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That's a more difficult question...

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I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,

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especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

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Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.

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It was called Creative Commons.

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So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people, creators,

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a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.

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So if copyright is all about "All rights reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some rights reserved" model.

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I want a simple way to say to you: here is what you can do with my work,

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even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do.

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And Aaron's role was the computer part.

0:14:16.501,0:14:21.222
Like how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

0:14:21.222,0:14:24.637
and expressed in a way so that machines can process it.

0:14:24.637,0:14:29.994
And people were like: why do you have this 15 years old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?

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Don't you think that's a huge mistake?

0:14:32.159,0:14:35.679
And they're like: the biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid.

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He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium.

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And it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,

0:14:43.102,0:14:45.968
where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.

0:14:46.874,0:14:51.257
When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose license",

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it gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you got three simple questions:

0:14:57.740,0:15:00.225
Do you want to require attribution?

0:15:00.225,0:15:03.507
Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?

0:15:03.507,0:15:06.224
Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

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I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult.

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And Aaron stood up there in fromt of a whole audience full of people and just started talking

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about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons.

0:15:20.931,0:15:23.372
And they were all listening to him. Just...

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I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?

0:15:28.892,0:15:30.438
But they did...

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Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

0:15:33.334,0:15:37.171
Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,

0:15:37.216,0:15:40.572
the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

0:15:40.572,0:15:46.776
Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

0:15:47.412,0:15:56.638
He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

0:15:57.651,0:16:01.521
Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

0:16:01.521,0:16:06.722
I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

0:16:06.722,0:16:11.429
I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

0:16:11.429,0:16:15.556
I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

0:16:15.636,0:16:19.661
Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

0:16:19.661,0:16:21.654
on things that won't have an impact.

0:16:21.654,0:16:26.161
I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

0:16:26.161,0:16:32.086
I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

0:16:32.086,0:16:37.526
I want to make the world a better place.

0:16:41.102,0:16:46.292
In 2004 Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

0:16:46.396,0:16:52.486
He'd had all enterocolitis, which was very troubling and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

0:16:52.740,0:16:57.223
He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day.

0:16:57.223,0:17:01.093
And one of these pills was a steroid which daunted his growth,

0:17:01.093,0:17:04.782
and made him feel different from any of the other students.

0:17:04.782,0:17:07.828
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

0:17:07.828,0:17:12.801
and finds himself in effectively a baby-sitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

0:17:12.801,0:17:20.828
who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and 1%'ers

0:17:20.828,0:17:25.578
and I think it just made him bananas.

0:17:26.077,0:17:29.197
In 2005, after only one year of college,

0:17:29.197,0:17:35.874
Schwartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

0:17:36.431,0:17:39.777
He's like: hey, I have this idea for a a website!

0:17:39.851,0:17:43.170
And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says: yeah, sure!

0:17:43.170,0:17:46.650
Suddenly he drops out of school, moves to this appartment...

0:17:46.668,0:17:49.604
So this used to be Aaron's appartment when he moved here.

0:17:49.604,0:17:55.397
I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

0:17:55.397,0:17:58.737
'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

0:17:58.742,0:18:04.989
Aaron lived in what's now the living-room and some of the posters are leftovers from when Aaron lived here.

0:18:04.989,0:18:09.889
And the library... there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

0:18:11.551,0:18:17.511
Aaron's Y Combinator site was called infogami, a tool to build websites.

0:18:17.511,0:18:21.098
But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

0:18:21.098,0:18:25.037
merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

0:18:25.037,0:18:29.919
It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called reddit.

0:18:29.919,0:18:34.488
That we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

0:18:34.488,0:18:37.657
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website.

0:18:37.657,0:18:39.846
And it showed no signs of letting up,

0:18:39.846,0:18:44.373
first we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on... It was just incredible...

0:18:44.373,0:18:49.563
reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

0:18:52.642,0:19:01.220
There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flocked to the site

0:19:01.220,0:19:07.883
and made that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

0:19:07.883,0:19:12.008
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

0:19:12.008,0:19:19.368
so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

0:19:19.368,0:19:24.824
and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

0:19:24.824,0:19:29.716
there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home

0:19:29.716,0:19:33.929
and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy as well.

0:19:33.929,0:19:36.791
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

0:19:36.791,0:19:41.081
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Conde Nast,

0:19:41.081,0:19:42.938
who makes an offer to buy the company.

0:19:42.938,0:19:46.939
Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

0:19:46.939,0:19:51.079
about like: "How do I store this money?"

0:19:51.302,0:19:54.272
- Like a lot of money...[br]- Like a lot of money.

0:19:54.272,0:20:00.319
Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

0:20:00.319,0:20:03.461
- And he's how old at the time?[br]- 19 - 20...

0:20:05.165,0:20:11.205
So it was in this apartment, they sat around [br]on what predated these couches

0:20:11.205,0:20:14.675
hacking on reddit, and when they sold reddit

0:20:14.757,0:20:18.641
they threw a giant party, and then all flew[br]out to California the next day

0:20:18.641,0:20:20.355
and left the keys with me.

0:20:24.261,0:20:28.629
It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start up so we all presumed [br]he was the richest person around

0:20:28.629,0:20:33.920
but he said "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little[br]shoe-box sized room that's all I need."

0:20:33.920,0:20:36.146
It was barely larger than a closet.

0:20:36.146,0:20:42.499
The idea of him spending his money on[br]fancy objects just seemed implausible.

0:20:42.580,0:20:45.960
He explains it as "I like living in [br]apartments so I'm not going to spend money on

0:20:45.960,0:20:47.988
a new place to live, I'm not going to buy a[br]mansion. And I like wearing jeans [br]

0:20:50.016,0:20:52.046
and a t-shirt, so I'm not going to spend [br]any more money on clothes.[br]

0:20:52.046,0:20:54.076
So it's really no big deal."

0:20:54.076,0:20:57.966
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic [br]flows on the internet.

0:20:58.140,0:21:00.680
And what commands our attention.

0:21:00.844,0:21:04.252
In the old system of broadcasting, you're[br]fundamentally limited by the amount of

0:21:04.252,0:21:08.583
space in the airwaves. You can only send out[br]ten channels over the airwaves, TV.

0:21:08.583,0:21:10.915
Or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

0:21:11.003,0:21:15.593
On the Internet, everybody can have a channel. [br]Everyone can get a blog, or a Myspace page.

0:21:15.690,0:21:18.274
Everyone has a way of expressing themselves. [br]

0:21:18.274,0:21:21.280
What you see now isn't a question of who gets[br]access to the airwaves,

0:21:21.280,0:21:25.330
it's a question of who gets control over the [br]ways you find people.

0:21:25.330,0:21:29.286
You start seeing power centralising in sites [br]like Google, they are sort of gate-keepers that tell you

0:21:29.286,0:21:30.993
where on the internet you want to go.

0:21:30.993,0:21:34.273
The people who provide you your sources[br]of news and information.

0:21:34.273,0:21:38.314
So it's not only certain people have [br]a licence to speak, now everyone has

0:21:38.314,0:21:40.904
a licence to speak. It's a question of[br]who gets heard.

0:21:45.196,0:21:49.806
After he started working in San Francisco [br]at Condé Nast he comes into the office

0:21:49.806,0:21:53.792
And they want to give him a computer with all[br]this crap installed on it.

0:21:53.792,0:21:57.273
And say he can't install any new things [br]on his computer.

0:21:57.273,0:21:59.375
Which to developers is outrageous.

0:21:59.375,0:22:02.095
From the first day he was complaining[br]about all the stuff.

0:22:05.317,0:22:11.147
"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first[br]day I showed up here I simply couldn't take it.

0:22:11.147,0:22:15.483
By lunchtime I had literally locked myself [br]in a bathroom stall and started crying.

0:22:15.483,0:22:18.285
I can't imagine staying sane with someone[br]buzzing in my ear all day[br]

0:22:18.285,0:22:21.575
Let alone getting any actual work done. [br]

0:22:21.575,0:22:24.087
Nobody else seems to get work done either

0:22:24.087,0:22:27.587
Everybody's always coming into our room to [br]hang out and chat, or invite us to play [br][br]

0:22:27.587,0:22:29.957
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

0:22:32.972,0:22:39.562
He really had different aspirations that were[br]politically oriented. And Silicon Valley just

0:22:39.667,0:22:47.442
doesn't really quite have that culture that orients[br]technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

0:22:47.544,0:22:49.613
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

0:22:49.613,0:22:53.673
They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron[br]is the only one who is not going to take it.

0:22:53.694,0:22:55.884
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

0:22:55.903,0:22:58.313
By not showing up to work, ever.

0:23:01.183,0:23:05.434
It was set to be a messy break-up. [br]Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

0:23:05.447,0:23:08.277
declined to be interviewed for this film.

0:23:09.251,0:23:15.891
He rejected the business world. One of the [br]really important things to remember about[br]

0:23:15.891,0:23:22.664
that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up[br]culture is that he was also leaving behind

0:23:22.664,0:23:31.334
the things that had made him famous and well-loved.[br]He was at risk of letting down fans.

0:23:31.422,0:23:34.176
He got to where he was supposed to be going, [br]and had the self-awareness

0:23:34.176,0:23:43.051
and the self-awareness and the orneriness to realize[br]that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

0:23:43.051,0:23:45.849
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost [br]his sense of smell.

0:23:45.849,0:23:50.399
And rather than sit there and insist that it [br]wasn't as bad as it seemed,

0:23:50.399,0:23:53.693
and he did get the rose in any event.

0:23:53.693,0:23:57.413
He climbed back down again. Which is pretty cool.

0:23:58.026,0:24:01.728
The way Aaron always saw it is that [br]programming is magic.

0:24:01.728,0:24:07.110
You can accomplish these things that normal[br]humans can't by being able to program.

0:24:07.110,0:24:13.310
So if you had magical powers, would you use [br]them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

0:24:15.009,0:24:18.478
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries[br]he had met as a child.

0:24:18.478,0:24:22.387
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,[br]Tim Berners-Lee.

0:24:22.387,0:24:25.938
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

0:24:25.938,0:24:29.260
one of the most lucrative inventions of [br]the 20th century. [br]

0:24:29.260,0:24:36.067
But instead of profiting from the invention [br]of the World Wide Web he gave it away for free.

0:24:36.067,0:24:39.707
It is the only reason the Worl WIde Web exists today.

0:24:41.118,0:24:45.261
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by TIm. [br]

0:24:45.261,0:24:50.928
Tim is certainly a very prominent early[br]internet genius, who doesn't in any sense[br]

0:24:50.928,0:24:55.865
cash out. He's not at all interested in how he's[br]going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

0:24:55.865,0:24:57.829
People were saying, ah there's money to be made there,

0:24:57.829,0:25:00.636
so there would have been lots of little webs.

0:25:00.636,0:25:02.139
Instead of one big one.

0:25:02.139,0:25:05.980
And one little web, all sorts of webs, doesn't [br]work. Because you can't follow links

0:25:05.980,0:25:08.280
from one to the other.

0:25:10.173,0:25:14.112
You had to have the critical masses, the [br]thing was the entire planet, so

0:25:14.112,0:25:16.902
it's not going to work unless the whole planet[br]can get on board.

0:25:24.141,0:25:29.232
I feel very strongly that it's not enough to[br]live in the world as it is, to just take

0:25:29.232,0:25:34.732
what you're given and follow the things that[br]adults told you to do, and that your parents

0:25:34.732,0:25:39.032
told you to do, and that society tells you to do. [br]I think you should always be questioning.

0:25:39.045,0:25:43.405
I take this very scientific attitude, that [br]everything you've learned is just provisional,

0:25:43.405,0:25:49.267
it's always open to recantation or refutation or [br]questioning. And I think the same applies to society.

0:25:49.267,0:25:54.041
Once I realised that there were real serious problems, [br]fundamental problems that I could do something

0:25:54.041,0:25:58.421
to address, I didn't see a way to forget that,[br]I didn't see a way not to.

0:26:02.600,0:26:04.831
We just started spending a lot of time,[br]

0:26:04.831,0:26:06.621
just kind of as friends.

0:26:08.912,0:26:11.884
We would just talk for hours, into the night.

0:26:14.393,0:26:18.110
I definitely should have understood that he was[br]flirting with me. I think to some degree[br]

0:26:18.110,0:26:23.980
I was like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, [br]and qtherefore I will pretend it is not happening.

0:26:25.161,0:26:28.937
As my marriage was breaking down and I was[br]really stuck without anywhere to go, [br]

0:26:28.937,0:26:32.927
We became roommates. And I brought my daughter over.

0:26:34.081,0:26:37.246
We moved in and furnished the house, and it [br]was really peaceful.

0:26:37.246,0:26:40.816
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and[br]really neither had his.

0:26:46.505,0:26:55.083
We were extremely close from the beginning[br]of our romantic relationship.

0:26:55.083,0:26:57.633
We were in constant contact.

0:26:57.633,0:27:02.432
But we're both really difficult people to deal with.

0:27:04.495,0:27:12.345
In a very Ally McBeal discussion he confessed he[br]had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

0:27:12.345,0:27:16.504
It was Extraordinary Machine, by Fiona Apple.

0:27:16.504,0:27:25.134
I think it was just that sense of being a little[br]bit embattled that the song has. [br]

0:27:25.134,0:27:27.837
And it also had this hopefulness to it.[br]

0:27:27.837,0:27:34.418
♪ By foot it's a slow climb. But I'm good[br]at being uncomfortable so I can't stop...

0:27:34.418,0:27:36.689
changing all the time ♪

0:27:36.689,0:27:44.481
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic[br]about life. Even when he didn't feel it, [br]

0:27:44.481,0:27:47.041
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

0:27:47.041,0:27:49.561
♪ Extraordinary machine ♪

0:27:53.237,0:27:58.317
- What are you doing?[br](Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

0:27:59.730,0:28:01.743
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

0:28:01.743,0:28:04.731
projects involving access to public information.

0:28:04.731,0:28:08.189
Including an accountability webside called[br]Watchdog.net

0:28:08.189,0:28:10.799
And a project called The Open Library.

0:28:10.986,0:28:15.299
So the open library project is a website[br]you can visit at openlibrary.org

0:28:15.299,0:28:19.778
And the idea is to be a huge wiki, an [br]editable website with one page per book.

0:28:19.778,0:28:23.910
So for every book ever published we want[br]to have a webpage about it that combines

0:28:23.910,0:28:29.551
all the information from publishers, from[br]booksellers, from libraries, from readers[br]

0:28:29.551,0:28:34.587
onto one site. And then gives you links where[br]you can buy it, borrow it, or browse it.

0:28:34.587,0:28:39.958
I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who [br]goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library

0:28:39.958,0:28:44.050
That's the dream of Open Library, [br]is building this website where both you can leap

0:28:44.050,0:28:49.297
from book to book, from person to author, [br]from subject to idea. Go through this vast tree

0:28:49.297,0:28:53.957
of knowledge that's been embedded and lost [br]in big physical libraries. That's hard to find,

0:28:53.957,0:28:59.086
it's not very well accessible online. It's really [br]important because books are our cultural legacy.

0:28:59.086,0:29:01.283
Books are the place people go to write things down.

0:29:01.283,0:29:05.813
And to have all that swallowed up by one[br]corporation is kind of scary.

0:29:06.730,0:29:10.771
How can you bring public access to [br]the public domain?

0:29:10.771,0:29:14.828
It may sound obvious that you'd have public[br]access to the public domain, but [br]

0:29:14.828,0:29:21.368
in fact it's not true. So the public domain [br]should be free to all. But it's often locked up.[br]

0:29:21.378,0:29:26.756
There's often guard cages. It's like having[br]a national park but with a moat around it,

0:29:26.756,0:29:33.245
and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody[br]may want to come and enjoy the public domain.

0:29:33.245,0:29:39.458
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in[br]was bringing public access to the public domain.

0:29:39.458,0:29:42.288
This is one of the things that got him [br]into so much trouble.

0:29:46.254,0:29:52.794
I had been trying to get access to federal[br]court records in the United States.

0:29:54.458,0:29:59.818
What I discovered was a puzzling system, [br]called Pacer. Which stands for[br]

0:29:59.818,0:30:03.124
Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

0:30:03.124,0:30:07.314
I started Googling, and that's when I ran[br]across Carl Malamud.

0:30:08.886,0:30:14.997
Access to legal materials in the U.S. is a[br]$10 billion per year business.

0:30:14.997,0:30:23.004
Pacer is just this incredible abomination[br]of government services. It's 10 cents a page, it's this

0:30:23.004,0:30:27.471
most braindead code you've ever seen. You [br]can't search it, you can't bookmark anything. [br]

0:30:27.471,0:30:31.891
You've got to have a credit card.[br]And these are public records.

0:30:31.891,0:30:37.429
U.S. district courts are very important, it's[br]where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

0:30:37.429,0:30:44.369
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists,[br]students, citizens and lawyers all need

0:30:44.369,0:30:50.067
access to Pacer and it fights them every [br]step of the way. People without means [br]

0:30:50.067,0:30:55.246
can't see the law as readily as people[br]that have that gold American Express card. [br]

0:30:55.246,0:30:58.376
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

0:30:58.376,0:31:03.236
You know the law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?

0:31:08.505,0:31:10.945
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

0:31:10.945,0:31:18.045
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the Pacer system and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records.

0:31:19.163,0:31:20.576
In fact, it's illegal.

0:31:20.576,0:31:31.946
The E-government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary, in order to reimburse the costs of running Pacer.

0:31:32.104,0:31:39.900
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the Pacer charges.

0:31:39.910,0:31:43.220
He started a program called the Pacer Recycling Project,

0:31:43.280,0:31:50.934
where people could upload Pacer documents that they already paid for to a free database so others could use them.

0:31:51.042,0:31:56.821
The Pacer people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

0:31:57.086,0:32:02.975
and so they put togheter a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free Pacer access.

0:32:02.975,0:32:09.125
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like pretty convenient.

0:32:09.125,0:32:13.353
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Court,

0:32:13.353,0:32:18.400
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the Pacer recycling site.

0:32:18.457,0:32:24.798
People take a thumb drive to one of these libraries and they downloaded a bunch of documents and they sent it to me.

0:32:24.899,0:32:26.549
I mean, it was just a joke.

0:32:26.549,0:32:31.209
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Court, there was a Wizard of Oz [movie clip],

0:32:50.314,0:32:53.544
you know, the Munchkin singing, so a videoclip came up:

0:32:53.624,0:32:55.664
♪ We represent the lollipop guild. ♪

0:32:55.814,0:32:59.724
But of course I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying:

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Court.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Around that time I ran into Aaron at a conference.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This really is something that has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So I approached him and said:

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Hey, I am thinking about an intervention about the Pacer problem.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download Pacer documents from the trial libraries.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Swartz wanted to take a look.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So, I showed him the code and I didn't know what would come next,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library and to begin to test his improved code,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in and soon there was 760 GB of Pacer docs about 20 million in pages.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries, Swartz was conducting mass automated parallel downloading of the Pacer system.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000